For clarity, Mr Joshua Hesketh is referred to as El Presidenté.
It was noted that this was against his will. El Presidenté’s wishes were overriden by majority of the Council.

Action item summary

ACTION: Whitelist the members for the council email list so that we don’t have to spend time moderating the Council email list
ACTION: Kathy to get in contact with James Iseppi to figure out how we get the LCA signup sheets into MemberDB.
ACTION: We would like for subcommittees to have a spiel on their website for people UPDATE from Kathy: This was around the Subcommittees having something on their website to promote Linux Australia membership - for instance where say WordCamp runs, we want WordCamp to have a link for people to sign up for Linux Australia membership.
ACTION: Kathy to check the constitution and make a decision and approve foreign members if required.
ACTION COMPLETE - The constitution does not prevent foreign citizens being members of LA.
ACTION: MemberDB needs to handle expired members. On the expiry email that goes out, make it VERY CLEAR that it won’t remove people from mailing lists, and tell people how to remove themselves.
ACTION: MemberDB needs functionality for emailing members
ACTION: We need someone to do announcing/posting to lists
ACTION: Kathy to chat with Peter Lieverdink and James Polley to identify way forward for making amendments to MemberDB to facilitate the expiry process
ACTION: El Presidenté to import information into mailman from MemberDB or vice versa. This action is postponed until members renew their membership to avoid annoying people.
ACTION: MemberDB changes required to automate things. Until we have that functionality in MemberDB, ensure all new members are added to the announce mailing list manually.
ACTION: Kathy to add the manual workaround to process documentation
ACTION: Get a CSV export from Zookeepr from web team James Iseppi to add to announce mailing list.
ACTION: Someone to add a statement to the mailing list subscription page around proper conduct on the mailing lists. http://lists.linux.org.au/listinfo
ACTION: All Council members to become more familiar with the constitution https://www.linux.org.au/constitution
ACTION: Clinton to finish AGM Minutes
ACTION: Once the AGM Minutes are finalised, someone to work with John Ferlito and Terry to submit to office of fair trading
ACTION: Someone to ensure Ghosts is being organised, currently with LCA2014 Perth team
ACTION: Set dates for the linux.conf.au 2015 bid process and execute the bid process by end of March. Now’s the time to start asking questions and start reviewing, shortlisting and selecting.
ACTION: El Presidenté to update the email that is sent to Subcommittees regarding reporting to advise that the information is made public on the Linux Australia webpage.
ACTION: Follow up expressions of interest with potential subcommittees to get them to formalise their actions and possibly submit formal subcommittee formation requests.
ACTION: Clinton to let LCA2014 know that it would be a good idea to have a ZooKeepr keeperer.
ACTION: El Presidenté to send credit card forms to Westpac
ACTION: Kathy to organise business cards for Council members
ACTION: Clinton to review previous grant request submissions to get a better feel for which requests were approved and which ones were denied to identify trends.
ACTION: Francois to reimburse Leon Brooks for opensource.org.au
ACTION: Steven Walsh to delegate this domain to linux.org.au
ACTION: Josh and Francois to communicate with the Sydney Joomla group and request a budget, and clarify that Linux Australia events keeps the profit from events that are run under Linux Australia’s auspices.
ACTION: Josh and Francois are to request a budget from Tim Plummer and the Sydney Joomla Day team
ACTION: El Presidenté to chase monitoring mailing list for Alistair Irvine
ACTION: Clinton to speak with Shaun Nyquist to gather more details about Shaun’s Vietnam travel grant request.
ACTION: Mail needs to be redirected to Kathy. Kathy to send John Ferlito her address.
ACTION: Kathy to talk to Peter to sort out MemberDB initial email so it points to the right website for members to change their password.
ACTION: Kathy to talk to Peter about Google Analytics
ACTION: Website refresh and hackfest. Will this be high value? Defer until we know what other action items are on our list.
ACTION: Kathy to upload the Stakeholder Mapping drawing
ACTION: The Media and Communications Subcommittee Charter needs to be reviewed by Council, then the interested parties should propose to Council to form the Media and Communications Subcommittee
ACTION: Set up mailing list for Media and Communications Subcommittee. Clinton to be the point of contact, Kathy to be on the mail list also
ACTION: Get photos of Council Members
ACTION: Photos of Council Members to go up on web page http://linux.org.au/council
ACTION: We need an FAQ for dealing with journalists and put it on the website
ACTION: We need to build a stakeholder picture of journalists to get a better picture of what they do, which area they work in. Would this be a good thing to outsource to a PR company?
ACTION: We need to understand what the community reads - there is a touchpoint here with the upcoming member survey. What do members of the open source community actually read. What do our prospective members read?
ACTION: Kathy to set up list of journalist and media contacts
ACTION: Clinton to create a list of LUGs/tech mailing lists

El Presidenté welcomed delegates and opened the meeting.
1. Confirm accuracy of previous minutes of meeting 14 Feb 2013
Moved as correct by El Presidenté, seconded Bianca, passed unanimously
2. Review of previous action items
Moderation of requests to ctte@linux.org.au
ACTION: Whitelist the members so that we don’t have to spend time moderating the Council email list
Document travel agency details
UPDATE: Documented on wiki, complete
3. Items for discussion
Round table with blue sky vision thinking for Linux Australia
The vision and activities the Council want to be working on this year include;

Becoming more than just Linux and being the organisation that represents open technology
Becoming more involved in lobbying the government on open technology issues
Supporting user groups and facilitating development and growth there
Extending the grants program and doing better outreach in this space
Enabling user groups and people to do cool things
Making Linux Australia more relevant to people who are not currently members - and extending our reach beyond our current community
Encouraging outreach to younger people and universities to get people interested in Linux Australia who might not otherwise want to be involved. This also involves supporting other organisations that are doing cool stuff, and including officially endorsing some efforts by other organisations.
Increasing our public profile and public voice - and be consulted more on open technology issues.
Fight against software patents and TPPA
Better representing member needs - including running a member survey
Better defining the member lifecycle and targeting action at different points in the lifecycle
Run excellent conferences, but make sure the conferences don’t conflict.
We want to do better communication with stakeholders and the stakeholder environment

The Council discussed the particular skills and attributes they bring to the table and the roles they would like to play within the team.
SWOT Analysis
Council undertook a SWOT analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to help guide and prioritise actions for the year.
Memberships
Discussion was held around how new members are approved.
ACTION: Kathy to get in contact with James Iseppi to figure out how we get the LCA signup sheets into MemberDB.
ACTION: Subcommittees to have a spiel on their website for people
Discussion was held around whether people who are not Australian citizens can be members of Linux Australia?
ACTION: Kathy to check the constitution and make a decision and approve foreign members if required

Discussion was held around cleaning up MemberDB. Points raised included the lack of consistency between mailing lists and MemberDB, and downsides of expiring members such as a reduced membership base.

DECISION: It was decided that MemberDB would be cleaned up this year by running an expiry process.
Membership tiers
Discussion was held around whether Linux Australia needs different membership tiers, possibly with paid memberships. There is no current financial imperative to do this. Council was also mindful that if people pay money to be a member of Linux Australia they will have higher service expectations. The key reason for paid memberships would be to allow people who want to make more of a contribution to be able to do so. General consensus that paid membership tiers are not required at this stage.

MOTION moved by El Presidenté that we;
1. Have a single free membership tier
2. That memberships are expired/renewed annually via an online mechanism before 1st October in accordance with Clause 4(e) of the Constitution
Seconded by François, carried unanimously

It was noted that we need to ensure that we make memberships ‘inactive’ rather than removing them entirely in case membership data is completely lost. Are there privacy principles that need to be upheld. This may need to be researched in more depth. It was noted that this will require some MemberDB changes.

ACTION: MemberDB needs to handle expired members. On the expiry email that goes out, make it VERY CLEAR that it won’t remove people from mailing lists, and tell people how to remove themselves.
ACTION: MemberDB needs functionality for emailing members
ACTION: We need someone to do announcing/posting to lists
ACTION: Kathy to chat with Peter Lieverdink and James Polley to identify way forward
Mailing lists
It was agreed that there should be more correlation between MemberDB and the mailing list. Any new member gets subscribed to la-announce - they can unsubscribe and still be a member of LA. We need to ensure everyone is a member to start with and then can unsubscribe if they want to be. We discussed whether we should just have an la-members mailing list which is consistent with MemberDB, but this created more overhead.

It was agreed that we need a method to contact all members that is not mailman dependent, and that we need to audit the mailing list and ensure that every current member in MemberDB is on the announce mailing list, and ensure that all new members are subscribed to the announce mailing list, and that members may unsubscribe from mailing lists.

ACTION: El Presidenté to import information from mailman to MemberDB or vice versa
ACTION: MemberDB changes required to automate things. Until we have that functionality in MemberDB, ensure all new members are added to the announce mailing list annually
ACTION: Kathy to add the manual workaround to process documentation
ACTION: Get a CSV export from Zookeepr from web team James Iseppi to add to announce mailing list.

Council discussed mailing list policy, and whether we need a brief statement on the mailing list subscription page to state we have the ability to remove posts or ban members if content is inappropriate.
ACTION: Someone to add a statement to the mailing list subscription page around this.
http://lists.linux.org.au/listinfo

Council decided that we would wait until after membership expiry/renewal before auditing the membership of the email list. It was noted that privacy requirements are better for opt in than opt out - if people are interested they will opt in. People who aren’t interested won’t know about it.
Constitution
Discussion was held on what value it adds to change it. A number of pros and cons were debated, and it was decided to leave it ‘as is’ at the moment.

ACTION: All Council members to become more familiar with the constitution
https://www.linux.org.au/constitution
AGM Minutes
In progress.
ACTION: Clinton to finish AGM Minutes, work with John Ferlito and Terry to submit to office of fair trading
linux.conf.au
LCA2013

Debrief is being planned for late March, getting dates is difficult. Financial position is unknown at this time and will be confirmed during debrief. Final accounts are not settled as yet. Discussions regarding the venue - staff costs on top of the hall hire for ushering due to legal requirements. B&G accommodation costs need to be sorted.
LCA2014

Ghosts will be held around the 27th April. Coming along nicely. Working with venue around dates. Clinton will be the liaison, and other Ghosts will be in attendance.

LCA2015

Expressions of interest have been received already, even without the call for Expressions of Interest going out.

ACTION: Set dates for the linux.conf.au 2015 bid process and execute the bid process by end of March. Now’s the time to start asking questions and start reviewing, shortlisting and selecting.
Subcommittees
Admin team
Admin team report filed in November. Admin team don’t need to report too often. Hosting agreement under negotiation.
linux.conf.au
Last report by 2013 filed in July, good to get an update from them at Ghosts
Newcastle LUG
Filed a report in September. No activity to report.
Mirror team
Michael Still is leaving the Mirror Team. Council noted his excellent contributions to date. Under control at the moment, team can do a call for participation if required. Next report end of May.
PyconAu
Reporting set to bimonthly. Planning going well for 2013.
Webteam
Last report March 2012, next report due March 2013.
WordCampMelbourne
Reporting set to bimonthly.
Retired subcommittees
Council reviewed a number of retired subcommittees. Discussion held around putting in previous subcommittees to Drupal, and whether to put old ones in so we have a historical record. Discussion around who is responsible for checking reports. Council is happy for events to run as Subcommittees.

Discussion around multiple bids for the same event. Process is generally if you want to run one, check in with the LA Council, so that we know about it and can determine objectively.
Another way to do this is to have an Events Subcommittee made up of Ghosts of previous events to provide advice to Council. Designed to produce successful conference - and say advise on who should run the next conference. Do we have a subcommittee that parents subcommittees - ie all of them. As long as it was understood that they are recommendations and that Council could override. Have we reached the point where we actually need this? Council decided this was not yet required.
Subcommittee budgeting
Discussion around budgeting to break even on a per-person basis without sponsorship, and then as sponsors come on board add in extra schwag and benefits for the event. This should be a key principle of funding events. PyconAu has been very good in valuing exactly different sponsorship deals.
Subcommittee process
Subcommittee policy is documented at https://www.linux.org.au/policies/sub-committee
Discussion around whether we have any issues with current Subcommittee process, and tracking activities of subcommittee. Discussion around the reports from Subcommittee and whether we’re still happy for them to go straight to the Linux Australia home page.

ACTION: El Presidenté to update the email that is sent to Subcommittees regarding reporting to advise that the information is made public on the Linux Australia webpage.
Review of potential subcommittees
ACTION: Follow up expressions of interest with potential subcommittees to get them to formalise their actions and possibly submit formal subcommittee formation requests.

ACTION: Let LCA2014 know that it would be a good idea to have a ZooKeepr keeperer.
Insurance
Insurance definitely covers subcommittees
Budget, banks, finance and treasury
Council was informed of the expenses policy
http://linux.org.au/policies/expense

Expense claims should be logged with Treasurer, Francois.

Although LA is in a strong financial position, it’s going to be a tight year financially. No specific action is required currently to address this, we just need to be aware of this when deliberating financial decisions. We have sufficient reserves currently without curtailing grants or other expenditures.

Credit cards

Francois needs one
Kathy needs one

ACTION: El presidenté to send the credit card forms to Westpac
Sponsorships, donations and grants
General feeling to prefer grants over donations - so that there is a return on the investment. Discussion around outreach around getting more donation requests - something simple like just having business cards available so that you can provide contact details when say you’re at a conference.

ACTION: To organise business cards for Council members

Discussion held around whether we should we review previous grants? There is a grants page on the site at; http://linux.org.au/projects/grants. Council also discussed whether we should focus on more grants this year due to our strong financial position.

ACTION: Clinton to review previous travel and study submissions to get a better feel for which requests were approved and which ones were denied to identify trends.
Documentation and processes
ACTION: Mail needs to be redirected to Kathy. Kathy to send John Ferlito her address.

Utbox - fax to email - provided free
Council noted their thanks to Utbox for provision of this service.

ACTION: Kathy to talk to Peter to sort out MemberDB initial email so it points to the right website for members to change their password.
Outreach
DECISION: Regarding Eventifier - each event to make own decision, we will not provide as an umbrella service.

ACTION: Kathy to talk to Peter about Google Analytics
ACTION: Website refresh and hackfest. Will this be high value? Defer until we know what other action items are on our list.
Evangelism
Discussion around what activities we want to do here. We shouldn’t aim to do a million things. We can publish on the mailing lists about what we do and cross-pollinate things.
Stakeholder mapping
The Council mapped key stakeholders in and around the community in terms of importance and influence and prioritised according to the amount of effort that should be spent engaging the stakeholders. We prioritised the effort that should be spent engaging various stakeholders based on influence and importance.
ACTION: Kathy to upload the Stakeholder Mapping drawing to Council docs area
Media and Communications Subcommittee
Discussion around the Media and Communications Subcommittee Charter and how this Subcommittee adds value to Council. They could assist in writing promotional material. We would need to ensure the integrity of communications sent out in our name. We discussed whether the Subcommittee could produce a newsletter each month and maintain a list of journalist and user group contacts. Council could then fill the gaps

ACTION: The Charter needs to be reviewed by Council, then the interested parties should propose to Council to form the Media and Communications Subcommittee

ACTION: Set up mailing list for Media and Communications Subcommittee. Clinton to be the point of contact, Kathy to be on the mail list also

Council welcomed Brianna Laugher as the contact for the Media and Communications Subcommittee. We discussed having a monthly newsletter. Expectations of the Media and Communications Subcommittee were discussed, noting the amount of work that could possibly be involved, and needing to constrain this.

The draft charter for the Media SubCommittee was reviewed.
http://wiki.linux.org.au/Roles_and_things

Council discussed the role of Media SubCommittee

Newsletter
Press releases
Maintaining a list of journalists
Maintaining a list of mailing lists
Maintaining a list of Calls for Papers
Sourcing feedback from the community
Assisting with Social Media - Twitter, Facebook.

Council discussed some of the the things that could be in the Newsletter

Calls for Papers
Upcoming events
Highlights of blogs and social media posts
LUG of the month
Podcast of the month
Links to the minutes
Links to videos of confs
Highlight community member / interview
NO CLIPART!

MOTION: Kathy moved that the Media and Communications Subcommittee be instantiated based on the current charter. Seconded by Bianca, passed unanimously.

ACTION: El Presidenté to give Brianna access to the Media Portal on the Wiki
ACTION: El Presidenté to set up reporting for the Media and Communications Subcommittee on Drupal
ACTION: Kathy to set up list of journalist and media contacts
ACTION: Clinton to create a list of LUGs/tech mailing lists
4. Review of correspondence
opensource.org.au (Leon Brooks)
ACTION: Francois to reimburse Leon Brooks
ACTION: Steven Walsh to delegate this domain to linux.org.au
AV Co-ordinators report
Report was thorough. El Presidenté has thanked Paul for his report. No further action required on this matter.
Subcommittee request for Sydney Joomla Group from Tim Plummer
Request was approved in principle, some further information is required to progress.
ACTION: Josh and Francois to communicate with the Sydney Joomla group and request a budget, and clarify that Linux Australia events keeps the profit from events that are run under Linux Australia’s auspices.
ACTION: Josh and Francois are to request a budget from Tim Plummer and team
Request for monitoring mailing list from Alistair Irvine
Request for mailing list approved
ACTION: El Presidenté to chase monitoring mailing list for Alistair Irvine
Request for Vietnam Open Source Training from Shaun Nyquist
Grants policy requires that members have two weeks to provide feedback.
DECISION: Council will defer decision until members have had an opportunity to provide feedback in line with Grants policy. Decision to be made at next teleconf.
ACTION: Clinton to speak with Shaun Nyquist to gather more details about the request
Sponsorship request from BarCampMelbourne from Ben Dechrai
Request withdrawn, no further action required.
5. Media training

Council welcomed Brad Howarth as the Media Trainer for the day. Brad provided his very accomplished career background in technology journalism. Brad is driven by wanting to help people become interesting storytellers, so helps people articulate technology stories and the passion behind them. He has a very strong media training background.

http://au.linkedin.com/in/bhowarth

Council received a presentation from Brad around how to deal with the Media, advice for working with journalists, and participated in mock interview training. Consensus this was good value.

ACTION: Get photos of Council Members
ACTION: Photos of Council Members to go up on web page http://linux.org.au/council
ACTION: We need an FAQ for dealing with journalists and put it on the website
ACTION: We need to build a stakeholder picture of journalists to get a better picture of what they do, which area they work in. Would this be a good thing to outsource to a PR company?
ACTION: We need to understand what the community reads - there is a touchpoint here with the upcoming member survey. What do members of the open source community actually read. What do our prospective members read?
6. Deferred

Awards
Member survey
Member services

MEETING CLOSED 1730hrs 3rd March
NEXT MEETING via teleconference Thursday 15th March 1945hrs
7. Matters discussed in camera
Five matters were discussed in camera, and cannot be made public at this time due to the need for privacy and confidentiality.